A medical clinical skills laboratory: towards a safer future for medical education

Ring! Ring!

It is early morning and a final year medical student rushes over to the nurses’ station to answer the phone. Yes. Immediately. Bed four? Reaching the bed, she sees her patient, Stan. Respiratory distress. 25 breaths per minute. A cursory glance at the ECG – Narrow QRS complex. Tachycardia. Supraventricular tachycardia? – and the stethoscope is whisked off its position around the neck. Crackles. With no nurses to help her she rushes off to the treatment room to get supplies to give her patient a dose of adenosine. After finally finding a sharps container, the distraught medical student quickly swipes the antecubital fossa and searches for a vein. Found it! Needle in, push the drug and a wave of relief floods through the medical student. The patient seems to be quieter and sleeping now. Only then does the medical student look at the ECG again: oddly, it’s a flat line. Thankfully, episodes such as this are not common, but fears of making a fatal mistake as a young intern are commonplace. This entire scenario, however, is false. False, in that it took place in a clinical skills laboratory with no risk to any real patients: ‘Stan’ is a patient simulator.